Aftermath A just post S1 A2A fanfic oneshot
by Wanna Be Abby
Summary: So the parents of Alex Price are dead. How does the grown up and temporarily space/time continuum misplaced adult Alex cope with it all? Not alone, well, not for much longer anyway - whether she likes it or not...


**Aftermath - ****An A2A fanfic**

A post-S1 finale wish fulfillment thing that just popped up in my tortured mind, held aloft by the Froggy Muses that sometimes plague me :) C'mon, don't tell *me* Alex witnessed her parent's death, then the cover up and went back to work the next day and got on with life like it had never happened! Major trauma people, major trauma. As such, and in times of lesser trauma, we all need time to process and deal with events and people, and Alex for all her psychology is no different. Just when she thought she'd be heading home it was all snatched away from her. And lets not forget fellow Ashes fans - Arthur Layton is still out there - and who *was* he speaking to just before he shot Alex in 2008? Grrr - bring on S3!!  
However, in the meantime, lets slip back to close of play S1, 1981 and pay a visit with Alex.

_**(Cue Ashes To Ashes Theme Music)**_

It was strange, thought Alex, how loud silence was.

She was sitting in her flat, listening to what – in London – passed for silence.

She could hear her neighbour upstairs moving about, quiet footsteps and then the faint muffled sounds of a television being switched on, followed by the volume descending as it was swiftly adjusted.

The flat downstairs was Luigi's, and it was quiet. Alex knew he worked every hour God sent at his restaurant-cum-wine bar so the lack of noise wasn't exactly a surprise to her.

Outside the traffic boomed by, but it sounded far away and remote from her.

The silenced echoed in her ears like the ocean pounding on a deserted beach.

Only without the cry of a seabird or the opportunity of a fruit based alcoholic drink.

She wiped her tears away from her cheeks with the back of her hand, and drew another deep, shuddering breath.

It had been two months since she had once again witnessed her parents' death.

The first time, as a child, chasing an errant red balloon, she knew they had been murdered in a flash of bright light.

Alex grew up knowing this. It was a cornerstone of her existence.

And even after the lapse in her faith, the certainty of the manner of her parents' death remained.

And now she knew it had been a lie.

Everything she had subconsciously built her life on and around had been a lie.

And in her desperate efforts to stop their murders this time around, Alex had discovered the ugly and messy truth.

It had not been murder.

Well, not just murder.

It had been a murder/suicide.

The facts that Alex could not deny – her mother's brief but certain infidelity with Evan had driven her previously unidentified emotionally unstable father to an unforeseen conclusion.

Her own father, terrified by the thought of losing his wife and only child had arranged a way they could stay together. Forever.

Tim Price – a man tipped for a QC by his peers - had used the full force of his charm and legal knowledge to convince an experienced Judge and Jury to free a man convicted of bomb making and terrorism charges.

He had then paid the man – Arthur Layton – to make a bomb and fit it to a car.

A car he borrowed from the man who had made him – Tim Price – a cuckold.

The final betrayal of trust to his family was to insist he drive his wife and child to the station where he feared he would wave goodbye to them and his only hopes of happiness.

Alex knew that somewhere in her father's history would be an act of abandonment. Perhaps one of his parents had died when he was too young to comprehend it and the remaining adult hadn't dealt with his child's emotions? Maybe his father had walked out on his mother and Tim thought it was his fault? Perhaps his mother had had an affair and left his father, leaving their child confused and shouldering the blame?

Whatever the reason, there would be one. A perfectly reasonable event that would, professionally speaking, have Alex going 'Ah – well, there you go, that's the moment right there.'

Right now, and in a deeply ironic turn of phrase, Alex knew if her father was still alive, she would have killed him.

And yet, would she? Her mother had started all of this off, hadn't she? By starting that inflammatory affair with Evan, Caroline had risked everything she held dear.

Tim could have walked in on them, arriving home unexpectedly from a work trip.

Alex, the child Alex, could have witnessed something more than furtive snogging in the hallway.

Caroline and Tim Price weren't exactly adored by the Establishment - Caroline had told Alex that much herself, so it wasn't a total shot in the dark that an agent of the Establishment could have gained evidence of the affair.

It hadn't been that hard for that guy working to bring down the Communist group of women to get the photos that still made Alex feel sick.

All in all, Alex was struggling with the evidence before her that she'd had the childhood she thought she'd had.

Were the few memories she held of the time she'd spent with her parents so wrong?

She sat on her sofa, television talking to itself, and rolled her glass of white wine around in a glass. She had poured herself a glass from the bottle in her fridge, intending to get, once more, totally drunk in order to stop thinking over and over the situation that had lead to her parents' death in that firebomb.

Needless to say she hadn't been able to listen to David Bowie since.

The weather had firmly set itself into late autumn, with cold winds and the need for the heating to be turned on and up since the explosion.

Alex hadn't been to Luigi's much either in the last two months, preferring to pick up a bottle of wine and sit in her flat alone, picking over a meal she didn't want and couldn't taste, and staring at a television she could neither see nor concentrate on.

Was this it then? She often thought.

Is it all over? I am actually dead and this is the afterlife?

Am I doomed to relive the Falklands War? Band Aid? The fall of Communism?

Too many nights she crawled into bed and sought the safety of sleep, aided by alcohol.

She knew she was living on a knife edge with her sanity, all her studies at college and her qualifications told her that.

At a glance she was coping, her work unaffected, her demeanour a little quieter perhaps but her determination and loyalty to her job was still there.

It was a façade, and Alex knew, deep inside her that she had to deal with the full impact of the truth of her parents' death in order to be able to move on.

She feared if she was unable to do so, she would be able to attend her own graduation at University in, oh, about fourteen years time.

God, that was depressing.

She stood up, brushing away the tears that had run down her cheeks, smearing both mascara and eyeliner down her face in the process.

She pulled a tissue from the box on the coffee table, and blew her nose.

Straightening up, shaking her head, and consequently her permed hair, she put the wine glass down on the floor by the sofa and marched up to the mirror in the living room.

She stared herself in the face, wincing slightly at the sorry sight she made, then looked down.

Walking away from the mirror, she disappeared into her bedroom, returning a short time later with a face clear of all make up and her hair pulled back with a chiffon scarf, holding the corkscrew curls clear of her eyes.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and pushed her shoulders back, looking herself honestly in the eye.

She took a deep breath and told herself:

'Alex, you couldn't have stopped your father doing what he did. You honestly didn't know it was his plan. You could not have stopped your mother having an affair with Evan. Your parents and godfather were and are human beings and you cannot control them. None of this is your fault. Let the guilt go. Concentrate of fighting to get home. Home. To Molly.'

And she let out the long agonising breath she found she still held in her lungs.

To her amazement and relief she did feel better.

She turned away from the mirror and started to take down the calendar she had made when she first arrived in 1981, folding paper and photographs, photocopies and scribbled notes up carefully. Finding an envelope in a drawer, she put the folded documents into the envelope.

Tomorrow she would go to the incinerator situated at the back of the station and burn them.

As she was changing for an early, sober night, for once thinking about reading a book she had bought in the summer and had never got round to reading, the phone rang.

She sighed heavily, but padded to the ringing instrument only to hear a 'click' as the caller disconnected.

'Don't wait then…' she muttered and went back to her bed.

Less than dozen pages into her book, a loud knocking could be heard at her door.

'Oh, good Lord,' she pushed her head into the open pages of her book, and left it on the duvet as she shrugged into her dressing gown.

'Bolly! Open up! Police!' an all too familiar voice demanded stridently.

Alex rolled her eyes and, despite herself, smiled a wry smile.

She unfastened the chain and opened the door to find Gene standing there, fists jammed into his overcoat pockets and looking furious.

'Where the bloody hell have you been?' he demanded, pushing past her and walking into her flat.

Alex closed the door with overdue care, knowing if she slammed the door she wouldn't be able to stop herself shouting at him.

'Here. Just here.' She replied, a bit too sweetly.

'You didn't answer the phone. 'Ere, have you got some Thatcherite wanker stashed under your duvet?' Gene asked staring her in the eye and leaning forward to her.

Alex pushed her hand through her hair and sat down on the sofa again.

'No. I've been here all evening. Just me. No visitors, no callers. Well, until you decided not to give me a chance to get to the phone!'

'Well you should move a damn sight quicker when I call then shouldn't you?!' Gene, hands still in coat pockets started to pace up and down the small room.

'Gene, it's late.'

'Not that late!'

'It's time I got some sleep – okay? I'm sorry I didn't reach your call, but until BT figure out 'Caller ID' and introduce 1471, I have no idea who has called - okay?'

''Caller ID'? '1471'? Bolly, have you been reading Special Branch files again? The day my calls are tracked down and noted, is the day hell freezes over!!'

Gene continued his pacing.

'Gene?'

'Yes?'

'What's going on?'

'Just what I was going to ask you!'

'Pardon?!'

Gene stopped pacing and sat down at the other end of the sofa. Alex pulled her feet up under her, knowing she probably looked like a spoilt housecat, but her feet were chilly, and she figured if she was going to have to listen to him thrash out some imagined wrong she might as well be comfortable.

'What's going on? Bolly – what's going on with *you*?'

'With *me*?'

'Yes, with you. You've been about as cheerful as a wet weekend in Whitby for weeks now, and even you can't have the decorators in that long!'

'How dare you!'

'I bloody well do dare! What the matter with you?'

'Why should you care?' Alex demanded fire in her eyes.

Gene opened his mouth several times, but nothing came out.

'Well, why?'

'Well, er, I can't have you not pulling your weight in CID can I? What sort of example does that give the rest of the department?' he offered, but it even sounded lame to his own ears.

'You can talk!' she raised her voice, laced heavily with sarcasm, 'Rolling in obviously hungover and barging about like a bull in a china shop!'

Gene grinned like a guilty schoolboy, an image Alex struggled with momentarily.

'So, come on then, Bols,' he asked again, studiously not looking at her, 'what's the matter?'

He looked back at her, furrowing his brow even more than normal.

'And why, for the love of misguided fashion, have you got your hair tied up like a cheap tart?'

Alex suddenly realised she hadn't removed the wisp of scarf that held her hair of her face. She reached up and touched it, tucking a rogue curl behind her right ear.

A moment ago she had been ready to shout right back at Gene.

A moment ago she was ready to tell him to bugger off in no uncertain terms.

That had been a moment ago.

She realised she was sitting in red and white pyjamas with a little white spot pattern, her hair tied up with a white chiffon scarf and her toes painted red.

With her Guv, and, her sub-conscious nudged her, possible love interest perched on the end of her sofa looking awkwardly at her.

What is a girl to do at a time like this?

Alex started to giggle and then, unable to stop herself, to laugh. Long and loud, laughing so hard she started to cry, laughing so hard she had to hold onto her ribs.

She didn't give a thought to what Gene may think about her appearance right then; she didn't give, in the immortal words of Rhett Butler, a damn.

All the remaining tension and weeks of self-induced guilt were released by her free and unstoppable laughter at this ridiculous moment.

Gene looked at her, unable to reconcile the woman of the last two months with the same woman sitting not two feet away from him laughing like an upper class hyena on heat.

God, he'd been worried about her.

Had she known? Had she cared? If she had known, would she have cared?

He'd tried a hundred times to start this conversation with her, started a thousand scribbled notes to try and leave so she would come and talk to him.

He smiled at his own ridiculous behaviour now, wise in hindsight.

If he'd have known it would have only taken a couple of drinks for Dutch courage for him to work up to asking her, he'd have done it weeks ago!

Alex's almost ear piercing shrieks of laughter calmed back down to a giggle and she wiped away the tears from her eyes with the sleeves of her paisley dressing gown.

'Oh Gene,' she gasped, still fighting breath back in her lungs for the act of speech, 'have you *any* idea how much I needed that?'

She looked up, and saw he had slumped back into his seat, pivoting slightly to be able to look her in the face.

For a moment, silence.

Then he winked at her and said: 'A lot of women have said that to me, Bolly!' and laughed his own short, gruff sound of amusement.

Alex coloured slightly and rolled her eyes at him.

'Any chance of a drink then, Bols?'

'I think I may have something tucked away. In case a friend should stop by…' she told him.

'Oh well, better crack it open then, hadn't you?'

'Oh, now you're my friend, are you?' she teased.

'Hmmph, don't go mad, woman...' Gene answered.

Alex stood up, folding back her dressing gown sleeves and padding into the kitchen, returning with a clean glass and the bottle of white wine she'd opened earlier.

'Not having one yourself? Not like you.'

'Ah, my glass is still nearly full from earlier,' she told him, and having poured him a drink, picked her own glass up from beside the sofa.

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, and then Gene asked:

'So, what the hells been the problem then Bols?'

Alex tipped her head from side to side, hearing the crick of her bones as she did so.

'Are you asking as my Guv, or as my friend?'

Gene studiously examined the coffee table in front of them.

Alex reached out and gently laid her fingers on the back of his hand. He looked up at her, feeling awkward once again at the physical contact.

'Because I do actually think of you as a friend, Gene,' she told him softly.

'Really?!'

'Yes,' she replied, pausing as she took a decorous sip from her glass, 'for all this mad, silly, ridiculous confusion happening around me, you're the only one who seems, well, real.'

'How much 'ave you had?'

'No, please listen Gene. When everything goes wrong, and please don't tell me things have been rose tinted since I arrived here, everyone else seems like a phantom, unreal, like if I reached out to touch them they'd slip through my fingers like fog or mist…'

'Bolly, you've got to give up reading Barbara Cartland!'

'And yet you're so real, so solid, that I can't dismiss you as a mere construct, or a figment of my overactive and tortured mind.'

'Bols, if anyone is tortured round 'ere it's me! What are you going on about?'

She dropped her eyes to the sofa and retracted her hand slowly.

'Just trust me Gene. It's what friends do, isn't it?'

Sometimes a moment passes by and an opportunity is lost.

Lately Gene had felt like he'd missed a lot of opportunities with Alex, chances to show he did care about her, chances to show he liked her, respected her, and yes, did trust her.

He sensed another opportunity about to pass him by, and so he reached out and took her hand in his.

Alex looked up, surprised at his response.

Nicotine stained and rough fingers, nails slightly chipped and a touch that had never felt the benefits of a manicure or hand lotion held her fingers.

She looked up at his face, and Gene looked at her, serious and yet somehow gentle.

'Yeah, Bolly, this is what friends do.'

There was a moment's silence and Alex moved close enough to hold Gene's hand in both of hers, wine glass placed carefully back on the end table.

'Then trust me when I say to you that whatever I've been dealing with over the last couple of months is now dealt with. Not completely, if I'm being honest, but in a neat little box where I can keep an eye on it and process it more rationally.'

'So, it's back to the ol' Bolly then is it?' Gene asked.

She smiled warmly at him, 'Pretty much I'd say.'

Gene grinned at her, 'Bloody hell! I thought you reckoned you were better!'

Work colleagues might have taken that the wrong way.

But friends, however they meet, never will…


End file.
